[Line6linux-devel] Status of line6 staging cleanup

[Stefan H. <ste...@gm...>]

I have begun cleaning up the staging driver so it can be merged by the
ALSA maintainers.

The first level of cleanups is to satisfy checkpatch.pl.  These are
mostly trivial changes and don't require much discussion.

Next I've begun trimming redundant code.  Some of the debugging
Kconfig options appear to be superceded by generic dumping tools like
dyndbg, usbmon, amidi/aseqdump so I am sending patches to drop them.
If you feel they should be kept please respond to the patches.

The real issue is what to do with all the sysfs attributes.  They
cannot be merged without further work, but I feel it is a mistake to
have them in the first place:

The sysfs attributes involve MIDI commands and some state.  If we
leave this to userspace then the kernel driver can focus on PCM and
MIDI I/O.  The code will become much smaller and simpler because we
can drop all the peeking into MIDI buffers and the housekeeping that
goes along with that.

Letting userspace handle MIDI means that line6linux development
becomes accessible to a wider group of developers - people not
comfortable with C or driver hacking.  It encourages people to explore
their devices and contribute code.

That said, I don't want to break the userspace tools that you have
written.  Can you point me to userspace tools that would need to be
fixed before we drop sysfs attributes?

Stefan